Noel Evans
04-02-2009, 06:54 AM
Went to the 302(300) launch locally and got some hands on.
Video below - and as much as I hate when I see this on other threads, sadly I have to, so sincere apologies. I have a caveat. That is I set the scene file to fairly well 0 on everything, thats fine, but I missed an important detail. The vertical detail frequency. As I was shooting progressive, this should have been set to thick and I was on thin, so I got some rough edges and slight steps. It wasnt til I popped the cam back on the tripod, pulled my p2 card out, connected the SDI that I saw it on the monitor and thought damn. I changed to thick and again thought damn. SO again, apologies. But anyway on and up.
So to reiterate - I shot, 1080/25pn, cinelike D - everything else at 0. It will be the users who will quickly report where best results can be had in diff. situations, so I went with basic.
So heres what I thought. And you can take from it what you will. I can only tell you what I saw. I may skip over some points that are common knowledge such as professional components like mechanical ND, waveform etc.
CAMERA
Body design is very sleek. Much nicer than I expected even though I have seen many pics prior to today. Hope Pana keeps this look.
Camera is light! You can hold the whole thing by the lens grip. Yeah I did it. You could carry this thing on your shoulder much longer than a 500. And I found the overall balance very good.
REAL LENS!!!! (Well not that other fixed lens cams dont use a real lens, if it wasnt real how would they operate? But I think you get the meaning).
EVF - very crisp. Very easy to get focus. Which brings me to the focus bar. Much easier in general to use and read than a histogram type focus assist.
LCD - Best LCD I have seen on a Panasonic camera. Same point as EVF, you can get focus very easily, but keeping in mind this camera with its inherent DOF characteristics (1/3"chip).
Control layout, very similar to other Pana shoulder mount cams, and as I am used to that, I liked the set up.
P2 card inserts. - Much better location, on the left side of the cam with all the controls.
You couldnt fit much more than the two slots it has there. Two slots enough? Upto the individual to decide that dependent on their workflow.
Well those were the standouts.
IMAGE
So, I didnt do anything special. My areas of concern for the clips I shot where, how it handle some clipping, how it handled some ugly high conrast backgrounds, how it performed in lowlight, how it went with quick pans.
So, the clips I shot reflect what I was personally looking at.
Highlights - actually this one surprised me a little. I thought it did a pretty good job rolling them off. Nothing I saw that came up ugly like you would see on the original HVX200 for example. (Check the clip)
High contrast backgrounds - Hmmm, today was an ugly day here. Cloudy, rain. White high contrast clouds, good for the test I wanted. SO the couple of shots I did surprised me - nothing terrible showed up and I really expected it to. (see palm leaves and top of building shot on clip)
Lowlight - Again pretty good, we are talking a 1/3"chip here and I got decent results in very dark places. Its no where near the 500 in this respect, but neither is an EX1 and you wouldnt expect them to be either. (Check the clip)
Skew - With a reasonably paced pan you can negate it fairly well, with a faster pan, wasnt so good and esp. telephoto - but you know the reasons behind that. 25pn showed quite a bit on the long end. (Check the clip).
Colour - POW. Great colour rendition.
DRS - Well its not like on the 3000 :P but would you expect the same on a 1/3" chip camera costing a shi* load less? Still a neat function. Didnt record any shots using DRS, but played with it for a good 5 minutes.
OVERALL - Its a 1/3" chip camera. And as such performs admirably. Its no 200a, 170, 150 - it is better because of the things I mentioned above and being the latest Panasonic camera on the market, you would expect a step forward from those. CCD v 3MOS? Not convinced entirely myself. But its an undeniably much sharper unit in a neat package.
Would I buy one? If I had the need I would. I think the 300 would perform exceptionally well shooting green screen, esp. over SDI, due to the resolution, controlled lighting environment and the fact its 10bit 4:2:2. And if I was doing it weekly and had a studio, I most def. would grab one for that purpose alone.
At the end of the day, I learnt a while back that resolution is not the most important factor in an images overall aesthetic. But I agree with the reasoning of Panasonic, as to many it is a defining factor. Pixel counters (term stolen from someone else) will love this camera.
Choose a cam any cam, theres always going to be a choice you need to make - do I take A or B.
Oh and as a side note. There was a rep from Fujinon there today, and a point raised was light loss due to using a 1/2" to 1/3" OR 2/3" to 1/3" lens adapter. The answer wasnt NO, but was that there would be a miniscule difference.
OK so heres the clip(remember my caveat above) and there are two clips where you can see me gaining it up - the first one goes 0db - 6db - 12db - 24db, the second is 0 - 6 - 12.
http://www.scarlet-films.com/HPX/300test.mov
Link temporarily down. Has killed my bandwidth usage on my site
Video below - and as much as I hate when I see this on other threads, sadly I have to, so sincere apologies. I have a caveat. That is I set the scene file to fairly well 0 on everything, thats fine, but I missed an important detail. The vertical detail frequency. As I was shooting progressive, this should have been set to thick and I was on thin, so I got some rough edges and slight steps. It wasnt til I popped the cam back on the tripod, pulled my p2 card out, connected the SDI that I saw it on the monitor and thought damn. I changed to thick and again thought damn. SO again, apologies. But anyway on and up.
So to reiterate - I shot, 1080/25pn, cinelike D - everything else at 0. It will be the users who will quickly report where best results can be had in diff. situations, so I went with basic.
So heres what I thought. And you can take from it what you will. I can only tell you what I saw. I may skip over some points that are common knowledge such as professional components like mechanical ND, waveform etc.
CAMERA
Body design is very sleek. Much nicer than I expected even though I have seen many pics prior to today. Hope Pana keeps this look.
Camera is light! You can hold the whole thing by the lens grip. Yeah I did it. You could carry this thing on your shoulder much longer than a 500. And I found the overall balance very good.
REAL LENS!!!! (Well not that other fixed lens cams dont use a real lens, if it wasnt real how would they operate? But I think you get the meaning).
EVF - very crisp. Very easy to get focus. Which brings me to the focus bar. Much easier in general to use and read than a histogram type focus assist.
LCD - Best LCD I have seen on a Panasonic camera. Same point as EVF, you can get focus very easily, but keeping in mind this camera with its inherent DOF characteristics (1/3"chip).
Control layout, very similar to other Pana shoulder mount cams, and as I am used to that, I liked the set up.
P2 card inserts. - Much better location, on the left side of the cam with all the controls.
You couldnt fit much more than the two slots it has there. Two slots enough? Upto the individual to decide that dependent on their workflow.
Well those were the standouts.
IMAGE
So, I didnt do anything special. My areas of concern for the clips I shot where, how it handle some clipping, how it handled some ugly high conrast backgrounds, how it performed in lowlight, how it went with quick pans.
So, the clips I shot reflect what I was personally looking at.
Highlights - actually this one surprised me a little. I thought it did a pretty good job rolling them off. Nothing I saw that came up ugly like you would see on the original HVX200 for example. (Check the clip)
High contrast backgrounds - Hmmm, today was an ugly day here. Cloudy, rain. White high contrast clouds, good for the test I wanted. SO the couple of shots I did surprised me - nothing terrible showed up and I really expected it to. (see palm leaves and top of building shot on clip)
Lowlight - Again pretty good, we are talking a 1/3"chip here and I got decent results in very dark places. Its no where near the 500 in this respect, but neither is an EX1 and you wouldnt expect them to be either. (Check the clip)
Skew - With a reasonably paced pan you can negate it fairly well, with a faster pan, wasnt so good and esp. telephoto - but you know the reasons behind that. 25pn showed quite a bit on the long end. (Check the clip).
Colour - POW. Great colour rendition.
DRS - Well its not like on the 3000 :P but would you expect the same on a 1/3" chip camera costing a shi* load less? Still a neat function. Didnt record any shots using DRS, but played with it for a good 5 minutes.
OVERALL - Its a 1/3" chip camera. And as such performs admirably. Its no 200a, 170, 150 - it is better because of the things I mentioned above and being the latest Panasonic camera on the market, you would expect a step forward from those. CCD v 3MOS? Not convinced entirely myself. But its an undeniably much sharper unit in a neat package.
Would I buy one? If I had the need I would. I think the 300 would perform exceptionally well shooting green screen, esp. over SDI, due to the resolution, controlled lighting environment and the fact its 10bit 4:2:2. And if I was doing it weekly and had a studio, I most def. would grab one for that purpose alone.
At the end of the day, I learnt a while back that resolution is not the most important factor in an images overall aesthetic. But I agree with the reasoning of Panasonic, as to many it is a defining factor. Pixel counters (term stolen from someone else) will love this camera.
Choose a cam any cam, theres always going to be a choice you need to make - do I take A or B.
Oh and as a side note. There was a rep from Fujinon there today, and a point raised was light loss due to using a 1/2" to 1/3" OR 2/3" to 1/3" lens adapter. The answer wasnt NO, but was that there would be a miniscule difference.
OK so heres the clip(remember my caveat above) and there are two clips where you can see me gaining it up - the first one goes 0db - 6db - 12db - 24db, the second is 0 - 6 - 12.
http://www.scarlet-films.com/HPX/300test.mov
Link temporarily down. Has killed my bandwidth usage on my site